forces
Recording such operations is also
recommended by a number of institutions, including the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), according to which it is a way to enable individuals to show how often they are subject to checks and identify possible forms of racial discrimination.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also recommend that receipts or reports be provided to individuals checked.
Regarding Spain, David Martin, a member of the Fuenlabrada municipal police, highlighted the launch of several projects aiming at reducing ethnic profiling and improving police-population relations. One of the measures taken is provision of receipts containing specific pieces of information to individuals subject to police checks. The use of receipts, which was introduced in Fuenlabrada in 2008, has led to a 2/3 reduction in the number of identity checks, and their success rate (how often they need to be followed up) rose from 6% to 17%. Fuenlabrada continued to use such forms with positive results; in 2012, their success rate reached 30%23.
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A P A R T I C I P A T O R Y Y O U T H A C T I O N /
R E S E A R C H T O D E V E L O P D I A L O G U E B E T W E E N P O L I C E A N D I N H A B I T A N T S A N D T O R E D U C E O R D I N A R Y D I S C R I M I N A T I O N
Hélène Balazard and Naïm Naili
Members of the PoliCité Collective, France In 2016, the PoliCité Collective launched a participatory action/research project that brought together youth professionals, a dozen young people and two researchers in Vaulx-en-Velin, a Lyon suburb that has been at odds with the police since 1990.
The Collective’s goal was to objectify and better understand the impact on young people of so-called ordinary discrimination, which is less visible and more difficult to identify.
The young people involved were trained to act as investigators and pass on the idea to other young people that routine acts of discrimination were worth reporting.
The carried out investigation found that tensions between police and the youth are not necessarily due to violent behaviour or open displays of racism. Alongside acts of so-called “pure” discrimination, there was a range of everyday micro aggressions including overfamiliar forms of address (use of informal pronoun “tu”), verbal confrontations and provocative gestures, leading to displays of aggression and provocative behaviour on the part of the young people involved.
Given the context of tension, the police saw identity checks as necessary in order to assert their presence on the ground.
“(…) for the police, the point of such behaviour was to get young people to demonstrate their submission to authority by a style of action that researchers describe as confrontational (…)”
Yet such practices have negative effects on the officers themselves, the conditions under which they exercise their profession, and on the young people they deal with:
“Such styles of action have harmful effects.
They increase suffering at work and adversely affect conditions under which they are acting in working-class neighbourhoods, and they also cause their young inhabitants to feel that they are being treated as second-class citizens, with sometimes major psychological consequences (loss of self-confidence, etc.)”.
(Hélène Balazard and Naïm Naili, members of the PoliCité Collective, France)
The PoliCité investigation brought to light the submerged part of the iceberg. In this context, it observed that recourse to the law was often ineffective, as young people were stakeholders in the phenomenon and police officers’
behaviour did not necessarily constitute obvious breaches of their code of ethics.
Based on this finding and in order to overcome such confrontational styles, the PoliCité Collective developed actions focusing on deliberation:
• Creation of an educational tool, a comic strip presenting the two viewpoints and which seeks to overcome reciprocal prejudices;
• Organisation of a citizens’ conference in December 2018, bringing together Vaulx-en-Velin’s police forces and inhabitants in order to give thoughts on how to turn confrontation into trust. The conference provided an opportunity for the various actors to discuss on equal terms and resulted in the adoption of 12 recommendations;
• Organisation of discussion evenings with the city’s police officers;
• Interventions in schools.
The PoliCité Collective has found that such deliberative actions have beneficial effects.
They help do away with institutional blindness as to the consequences of identity checks and lead professionals to examine the types of action involved in coproduction of conflicting situations.
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Regarding ethnic profiling, at the end of the citizen’s consensus conference, participants finally voted on a common proposal aiming at objectivising the consequences and effectiveness of identity checks, share them, providing pieces of information on legal remedies, and initiate a national project to end ethnic profiling.
In conclusion, the Collective states that security is not just a matter for professionals, hence the importance of making use of collective intelligence and promoting horizontal exchanges. It notes that there is on-going momentum to continue with the initiative.
T R A I N I N G I N L A W E N F O R C E M E N T
Training of police officers by their peers in order to reduce racial profiling
Bas Böing
Amsterdam police, the Netherlands
Bas Boïng’s mission as a member of the Dutch police force is to reduce illegal profiling by increasing professionalism through training programmes and action/research projects.
Racial profiling was acknowledged as being a systemic problem in the police force at all levels of its organisation. The acknowledgment of its existence made change possible and the decision was taken to root out the problem, from police officers’ routine practices to management policies and instructions. Policies and instructions are never intentionally
discriminatory, but they are sometimes drawn up by individuals who make mistakes or who are biased.
In order to ensure the mission, maximum effectiveness the project entitled
“Ambassadors” was launched, bringing together a group of 130 officers whose job was to assist about the implementation of change.
The initiative seems to have been generally well received, as police officers tend to discuss their practices with their peers.
One of the project’s training tools is “Search, Detect, React (SDR)”, a 2-day training course on predictive profiling during which officers learn to observe deviant behaviours and malicious intentions and are confronted with their own prejudices and stereotypes.
Training of European police officers Elisabeth Zinschitz (CEPOL, EU) As Elisabeth Zinschitz explained, at an European level, CEPOL provides training and advocates for cross-border training activities for law enforcement, including police officers, border guards, customs officers and other professionals as well as for judicial staff; these activities include residential and online training as well as an Exchange Programme. CEPOL’s cross-border training activities advocates for and promotes multi-disciplinary cooperation by bringing together members of security forces and other professions to develop a common culture.
P R A C T I C E S I N I T I A T E D B Y M E M B E R S O F E Q U I N E T , T H E E U R O P E A N N E T W O R K O F E Q U A L I T Y B O D I E S
Patrick Charlier
UNIA, member of Equinet’s BOD24 Equinet is a network of bodies promoting equality at an European level. Its missions include training and awareness-raising, research, carrying out studies and providing assistance, along with the processing, reporting and management of cases of discrimination. Equinet currently represents some 40 organisations in 36 countries, operating in and outside the EU.
Bodies promoting equality are distinct from bodies monitoring the police, even though they work alongside each other, because they have no legal mandate to deal with abuses committed by police forces as regards ethnic profiling, which is inevitably linked to racial discrimination.
24 Reference : http://equineteurope.org/2019/07/25/equality-bodies-countering-ethnic-profiling/
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In November 2018, Equinet held a seminar on ethnic profiling, focusing in particular on the role of equality bodies in this respect.
Equality bodies have carried out studies and held training courses on discriminatory checks, and have also played key roles in various national disputes, by investigating and reaching decisions presented in court.
Their participation has resulted in positive regulations and court rulings recognising the police’s obligation to act in non-discriminatory way.
It reveals on the one hand the illegality, unfairness and ineffectiveness of ethnic profiling, and on the other hand many obstacles whichhave to be overcome in order to remedy the situation (including denial of its existence, absence of statistics, the problem of lack of proof, and absence of redress).
One of the challenges highlighted by Equinet’s members is that the police is responsible for enforcing the law, including laws on non-discrimination. Therefore, they are allies of bodies that fight against discrimination as they are supposed to defend people who have been victim of it. Finally, police forces are also employers and the policy of diversity within their ranks is therefore important as it helps build trust in the institution.
P R O F I L I N G A N D U S E O F P N R S ( P A S S E N G E R N A M E R E C O R D S ) , I T S L E G A L F R A M E W O R K A N D T H E S A F E G U A R D S P R O V I D E D
Julia Ballaschk Police, Denmark
Julia Ballaschk pointed out, that within the legal framework of EU Directive 680/2016 on data protection within the law enforcement sector (Law Enforcement Directive), profiling is generally allowed. However, she stressed that certain restrictions apply when profiling produces adverse legal effects on the
individual or significant effects. In these cases, profiling needs to be authorised by law and appropriate safeguards have to be provided , at least when “human” interventions are planned.
Profiling, which is based on the so-called special categories of data (such as ethnicity, religion, political belief), “is only allowed when suitable safeguards are in place”.
All profiling which leads to discrimination is prohibited.
Julia Ballaschk then explained that “with the EU PNR Directive, a legal framework was created to produce a basis to profile flight passengers in order to identify unknown criminals on the basis of objective criteria, while at the same time providing strong protections for fundamental freedoms”.
The PNR Directive allows law enforcement authorities to collect personal information on a large number of individuals who were mostly law-abiding travellers. In order to balance the intrusion into the right to private life of innocent passengers, the PNR Directive only allows law enforcement authorities to process data in order to investigate and prevent specific serious crimes and terrorism.
With the use of PNR-information, she highlighted that “profiling is not always targeted at individuals but rather at certain objective criteria which can be connected to specific types of crime”.
For example, PNR-data shows travel routes, whether passengers take baggage with them and how they pay for their tickets.
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For crimes such as drug trafficking, this piece of information is very useful when algorithms are created to filter out travellers whom for example pay for their tickets in cash and use certain known drug trafficking routes.
For Julia Ballaschk the use of algorithms, “may prevent potentially discriminative profiling practices at border control points, such as ethnic profiling”.
Without PNR-data, potentially suspicious travellers are often singled out by border guards or customs officials based on
“gut feeling” or prior experience. It is not uncommon, that individual which fit unconscious or conscious stereotypes are overrepresented in these manual checks.
In the Danish police, all profiling rules need to be approved by a superior and are accessible to the Data Protection Officer. This puts a considerable limitation on potentially discriminatory rules. Additionally, all rules undergo quality checks and may only run for a limited time period in order to allow assessing whether the rule still is necessary. Additionally, all processing operations are logged and audited proactively.